the polar express
My Christmas tree is still up, so it's not too late to talk about this Christmas movie.
All I want to say is that this movie isn't as bad as you think it is. In fact, I kind of like it. Yes, the mo-cap animation is bad, and I'm glad they don't make movies that way anymore. I mean, motion capture is still used extensively today, of course, but I don't think anybody's made an entire animated movie starring nothing but uncanny valley human beings in quite some time.
Scary animation aside, one of the characters is a dead ringer for one of my second-graders, and it cracks me up every time I watch this movie.
Like, that's literally just a kid in one of my classes. You could put that as his yearbook photo and not even his parents would notice.
If you can get past the characters' latex-looking mugs, it's a pretty fun movie, and despite the wonky CGI, somehow it does a good job capturing the frosty, magical feel of Chris Van Allsburg's illustrations.
Unfortunately, just like the book, the movie slows to a crawl once the kids reach the North Pole. I don't know, to me the train ride was always the fun part (ironic, considering how grumpy I was about riding the " Polar Express" myself), and when they get out and talk to Santa I lose all interest. But it's especially bad in the movie, because this takes up like half an hour instead of two pages.
Besides, the depiction of Santa is not great. Someone needs to do a scholarly review of Santa portrayals in movies and identify the morphology of Santa himself and his elves, the level of technology they employ, the sentience and speech capabilities of the reindeer, the whole nine yards. There's this thing called the Aarne-Thompson-Uther (ATU) Index that classifies and labels virtually every trope, motif, and character type in world folklore. It's very granular, kind of like the Dewey Decimal System. I don't know if I'm explaining it right, but my point is, there should be something like this for Christmas movies that can parse all the various Santa portrayals into subtypes like "jolly trickster" or "godlike arbiter of morality," all the elves into things like "pointy-eared human analogs" or "tiny gremlins," all the workshops into "high-tech logistics hubs" or "quaint woodworking studios," and all the reindeer into "talkative colleagues of Santa" or "dumb airborne beasts."
Santa should be an exuberant, huggable man, someone whose arms you'd fling yourself into if you walked down the stairs and caught him munching Oreos at the kitchen table. In The Polar Express, Santa is not that. Oh, he seems kind enough, and wise, but he only seems to elicit the type of deference and good behavior that a retired army colonel might demand of the children playing in his neighborhood. They may be on their best behavior around this man, but they aren't going to smile and wave when they pass his house.
No, I can't think of an example of a good, huggable Santa off the top of my head. What, I gotta do everything around here? Find one yourself.
Originally, I was going to say that hugging Santa should feel the way you imagine it would be to hug Jesus. This painting (by a Western New York artist!) gave me second thoughts.
There's just a lot going on in this painting, and I have neither the time nor the hard liquor it would require to give it a fair shake. Let's just agree it's a masterpiece.
The artist, Fran Lagana Brooks, has done a number of paintings featuring Santa, Jesus, and Donald Trump (but never all three together). Her Facebook profile pic is a painting of Trump almost getting shot, with the caption "WHY IS GOD PROTECTING THIS MAN?" If your response is "yeah, why," you're missing her point, unfortunately. To her, it's a sign of providence. In another of her paintings, Jesus extends his upraised palm to a red-hatted Trump; one imagines him saying, "Talk to the hand." Or, to be more biblical about it, the gesture says nothing if not "depart from me, I never knew you." The artist's own comments reveal this is not the case, either. Far from rebuking a false prophet, Jesus is using the Force to turn Donald's head away from an assassin's bullet. I'm not going to pollute my journal with those images, so look them up yourself if I've whetted your appetite.
In conclusion, The Polar Express is a pretty good movie.